60 comments:

Windmills kill about a half-million birds a year already. This shouldn't surprise those monitoring. Some members any species that flies through the area will eventually be killed by the huge clubs flying through the air.

The data I've seen say wind turbines produce about 2/3 of their total power at night. Oops. Sorry about that 66% reduction in your energy production. That's gotta leave a mark on the return on investment.

It is interesting that while Billions have been spent on "studies" of how an increase in a trace atmospheric gas might affect climate/weather, there's been very little (none?) research into how removing energy from the winds might affect the same.Strange that.Anyone familiar with preparing grant applications?

Add the fear of a bat to other reasons environmentalist lefties want to return humans to hunter-gatherer status. Along with the opposition to Yucca Mountain and Sierra Club suing to shut down a solar farm because it might hurt a desert creature.

Ah children there are hidden chains to this though. The dead bodies of bats and birds are provender for various scavengers like coyotes, and oppossum, and skunks. So their population grows. And they spread diseases through their own interaction with humans. Or better yet , the spread of fleas. The fleas spread the bubonic plague which ravages the population. The population of humanity falls to where civilization is unsustainable. Humanity ceases to exist except in small hunter/gatherer enclaves. The upkeep and repair of the windmills falls off, the windmills cease to function, the bat population is restored and all is good with Gaia. See, that wasn't to hard to follow was it?

Wait just a darn minute here.Bats use sonar to navigate and can maneuver extremely well. I find it very difficult to believe that the bat died due to a collision with something relatively slow and steadily moving like a turbine blade.

I bet if an autopsy were performed they find some other cause [or primary cause] of the death of the bat.

Aug. 25, 2008 -- Researchers have found the cause behind mysterious bat deaths near wind turbines, in which many bat carcasses appeared uninjured.

The explanation to this puzzle is that the bats' lungs effectively blow up from the rapid pressure drop that occurs as air flows over the turbine blades.

"The idea had kind of been floating around, because people had noticed these bats with no injuries," said Erin Baerwald of the University of Calgary and lead author of a study about the finding in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers examined a large sample size of hoary and silver-haired bats found under wind turbines, performing necropsies on the bats within hours of their death.

The damage from rapidly expanding air in the lungs caused by the sudden drop in pressure was clear. Ninety percent of the bat deaths at the southern Alberta site involved internal hemorrhaging consistent with such damage, called barotrauma....

They're turning off the windmills at night, but local energy authorities think they can make up for the power shortfall by leaving their solar panels on 24 hours a day.

They could do what the Spanish did last year: they hooked up diesel generators to the output transformers of their solar panels and ran them all night long. That way, they could generate electricity at 7 cents/kwh, run it through the solar panel circuits, and sell it to the state at the subsidized "renewable" rate of 44 cents/kwh.